RECENT NOVELS.*
THERE is a touch of the sensational in the opening chapter of Wanderers, a new and decidedly attractive book by the author of Margot. A young country gentleman of ample means, married to a blameless wife and the father of two children, is afflicted with rn incurable passion for innocent vagabondage. In one of his periodical tramps he is mixed up in a brawl, locked up for administering summary punishment to a wife-beater, and on returning home finds that in spite of an alias he has been recognised in court, and that his wife and father—ignorant of the origin of the trouble—are indignant at the disgrace he has brought on the family. Francis Mayne's decision is swift and startling. Relying on his wife's dread of publicity, he induces her to consent to his leaving her for ever with one of the children—the choice is determined by lot—and disappears on the Open Road with his little daughter. Ten years elapse before we meet the two tramps again, and the interest of the story resides in the con- flict in the father's mind between his selfish affection for the comrade of his wanderings, and his sense of what is owing to a girl of her station on the verge of womanhood. In the end he reluctantly decides to return the child to her mother's keeping, and takes to the road alone. Madge's delight in her new surroundings, her loyalty to her father, and her sudden flight to rejoin him on the cessation of his letters are admirably and touchingly set forth. For the sensational prologue has been in great measure vindicated by what we learn in the subsequent chapters as to the antecedents of Francis Mayne, and the hereditary taint of unrest ascribed to the picturesque curse of the gipsy woman, whose husband had been unjustly condemned to death by one of Mayne's ancestors. Even in this sophisticated age instances of this nomadic bent, this "sense of aversion to, and rebellion against, the conventionalities and the unwritten laws of English upper-class society," are not unfamiliar amongst persons of gentle birth. Francis Mayne is no " scholar- gipsy," but he retains, along with a certain callousness and even inhumanity, a fair residuum of filial and parental feeling. He is, in short, a mixed character, but by no means unconvincing. Mr. Sidney Picker- ing, apart from the slight improbability of Mayne's chance association with the shepherd, another social rebel, or rather exile, abstains judiciously from exaggeration and the employment of coincidences. The story is worked out logic- ally enough from its premisses, and the author practises a self-effacement that is altogether artistic. The portraiture is excellent, witness this incisive commentary on the vicar's lonely old age :—" All his life had been lived in crime, the crime of being unlike other people, and now at eighty he showed no smallest sign of conversion Throughout his life nothing had stood more in the way of Philip Mayne's domestic happiness than the fact that he regarded all women outside his own domestic circle with eyes at once indulgent and humorous, and all the women inside it with an inveterate inclination towards criticism." Mr. Pickering is to be con- gratulated alike on his choice of theme and the freshness and sympathy of his treatment.
The average novel-reader rather resents being instructed, but we hope that no reader of Mr. Scully's graphic study of life among the Trek-Boers will skip the opening chapter in which he tells us all about the climate, the flora and fauna of Buslimanland, and the general characteristics of its inhabitants. Two points which Mr. Scully brings out are especially worthy of notice. The dwellers in this region "have but few ideas, and a vocabulary of little more than three hundred words to express these ideas in. The Bible is the only book they ever read, and of that they do not under- stand half the sense." The other point is that the desert life "which has filled the Arab with poetry and a sense of the higher mysteries, has sapped the last remnant of idealism • (1.) Wanderers. By Sidney Pickering. London : James Bowden.—(2.) Between Sun and Band: a Tale of an African Desert. By William Charles Scully. London Methuen and 00.—(3.) Dimmers' Dual. By E. and H. Heron. London : C. Arthur Pearson.—(4) In the Cage. By Henry James. London Duckworth and Co.—(b.) The Indiscretions of Lady Aunath. By Basil Thom- son. London: A. D. Lines and Co.—(6.) A Woman Tempted/Bin, By William - Westall. London: Chatto and Wicrlits.—(7.) Ph. Admiral. By Douglas Sladen. London; Hutohinson and 0o.-03.) Hannibal's Deughtor. Br Lientsnant.Colonel Andrew Haggard, D.S.O. London, Hutchinson and (to, from the Trek-Boer's nature, and left him without an aspira- tion or a dream." Such material may seem unpromising, but Mr. Scully, thanks to the qualities of artistic selection and sympathy, to say nothing of ample local knowledge, has lent the loves and hates of his unsophisticated dramatis persona genuine, and even engrossing, interest. It is perhaps improbable that of the two young Jews, brothers bred in Whitechapel, one should be so humane and honest as Max, and the other so sly, ruthless, and callous as Nathan Stein- metz. Otherwise Mr. Scully's portraiture is perfectly void of all flattering touches, and whether we are attracted or repelled, the homely figures of his Trek-Boers and Hottentots bear the irresistible stamp of lifelikeness. There is little story in Between Sun and Sand : it is rather a series of episodes connected with the household of an old Trek-Boer named Schalk Hattingh, whose grand-niece is courted by the gentle Jew. Schalk is a most sanctimonious old rogue, with all the Dutchman's supreme disregard for human life when it is the life of a native, and animated by a truly patriarchal contempt for his womenfolk. Even more striking than Schalk, who is drawn in masterly fashion, is the pathetic figure of the old Hottentot, Gert Gemsbok, who falls a victim to the brutal resentment of a vindictive Boer, but is signally avenged by the nemesis that befalls his murderer. That Mr. Scully is here drawing from the life is tolerably obvious from the minute account he gives of Gert's antecedents and the curious remark that while "the Hottentots are probably the most untruthful race under the sun, this Hottentot invariably made a point of telling the truth, and misfortune befel him in consequence." The life and death of this obscure martyr to the truth are told with rare pathos, a quality which re-emerges hardly less effectively in the tragedy of the rinderpest, " Noquala's Cattle," which completes the volume.
The strong vein of Imperialist sentiment which has marked the magazine stories of Messrs. E. and H. Heron is not alto- gether wanting from their first essay on a more extended scale, but the motive of Tammers' Duel, which is merely an episode in the life of a "rough diamond," is grotesque, and hardly affords these clever collaborators sufficient scope for the display of their peculiar gift. Tammers is a hero after their own heart, a Briton of true grit, but the figure he acts in the present instance is only quasi-heroic. The scene is laid in the Channel Islands, whither Count Jalowski, a notorious duellist, has fled after picking a quarrel with an English boy in Paris, and shooting him under circumstances which render his action almost indistinguishable from murder. Tammers, entirely ignorant of the identity of his interlocutor, says as much to the Count at table d'hôte, and is promptly challenged by the duellist. The choice of weapons being left to Tammers, he elects to use assegais, and after defeating the Count spares his life. It argues no little skill on the part of the Messrs. Heron that they should have been able to occupy one hundred and eighty pages with so slender a theme with- out ever becoming tedious. Their narrative is admirably crisp, and their dialogue alert. Yet it is impossible to avoid wishing that Tammers had beaten the Count with his own weapons, instead of resorting to a trick to effect his end. The short story which completes the volume, and relates an utterly quixotic act of patriotic devotion on the part of an obscure Scoto-Irish adventurer in South America, is a singu- larly fresh and dramatic illustration of the narrator's remark that "more men die for England than England takes any count of," That a telegraph clerk of an imaginative temper should be deeply interested in the private life of her clients and seek to follow out the clues furnished by their messages is natural enough. "Our young lady "—Mr. James never vouchsafes to tell us her name—who figures as the heroine of In the Cage found solace for the drudgery of her life in the railed-off corner of a grocer's shop in Mayfair by indulging a morbid desire to fathom the inwardness of the relations between two of her smartest customers. Having satisfied herself that Captain Everard is carrying on a dangerous intrigue with Lady Bradeen, she is so enraptured by the consciousness of Possessing their secret and the knowledge that Everard relies on her discretion, that she stays on at the office to help him, postponing her marriage to a prosperous foreman grocer at Chalk Farm, carries her curiosity to compromising lengths, gmeillatee between infatuation for and fear of Everard. and finally seeks precipitate refuge in the haven of decorous if prosaic matrimony when Everard "ranges himself" by marry- ing his mistress on the opportune death of her first husband. To render justice to this minute and ignoble episode, Mr. James has employed that portentous engine of style which in his recent books has reached the dimensions of a literary monstrosity. Take, for example, the following appalling sentence "Mrs. Jordan was ten years the older, but her young friend was struck with the smaller difference this now made : it had counted otherwise at the time when, much more as a friend of her mother's, the bereaved lady, without a penny of provision, and with stop-gaps, like their own, all gone, had, across the sordid landing on which the opposite doors of the pair of scared miseries opened and to which they were bewilderedly bolted, borrowed coals and umbrellas that were repaid in potatoes and postage. stamps."
We hope that no examination candidate may ever be con- demned to analyse the foregoing paragraph. To read it would be sufficient penance for the most indolent of reviewers.
With the remaining novels on our list we must perforce deal in cursory fashion. The Indiscretions of Lady Asenath- an ill-chosen title, and more suggestive of a problem novel than a series of vivid South Sea sketches—is from the lively pen of the author of The Diversions of a Prime Minister, and proves uncommonly good reading. The account of the cricket-match between the Tongans and the crew of a British man-o'-war is quite delicious. Mr. William Westall exhibits his command of vigorous narrative and natural dialogue in A Woman Tempted Him, though his new venture is hardly on a level with his admirable novel of the Tyrolese struggle for liberty, recently noticed in these columns. In The Admiral Mr. Douglas Sladen, greatly daring, takes Nelson for his hero, and, if he has hardly risen to the height of his argument, has produced a meritorious and readable noveL But in conscientiously endeavouring to reproduce, in the style of the narrator, the epistolary manner of a well- educated country gentleman of the time, Mr. Sladen has achieved prolixity rather than distinction. Hannibal's Daughter, as we gather from the dedication to the Princess Louise, is "a humble effort to present to the world in romantic guise such a story as may impress itself upon the minds of many who would never seek it for themselves in the classic tomes of history." For ourselves, we confess to find- ing the narrative in Arnold's Rome infinitely more fascinating and exciting than Colonel Haggard's pretentious amalgam of history and romance. Fancy Hannibal addressing Scipio thus : "I salute thee, Scipio, and right pleased am I at last to behold the gallant young cockerel who bath sworn to clip for him the wings of the old cock of the farmyard" !
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